Mercurial is a fast, lightweight distributed version control system with an intuitive model of distributed change history that makes sense, and a well-thought-out command line front-end that's easy to use.

Mercurial focuses on speed and accuracy. It can be use to handle projects with thousands of changes over gigabytes worth of files. The entire change history often occupies less space than a checked out version.

Mercurial has a broad contributor base from several countries and is being used for the Open Solaris project and some other large projects. There are 5 major contributors and many smaller contributors. Mat Mackall still leads the project.

Mercurial was created in early 2005, and was readily usable for most purposes by September 2005. It has only gotten better from there.